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Dan Gutman thinks like a
seven-year-old. And that is a very good thing, because it is the consistency of
his thinking at the level of the audience for which he writes that makes his
many, many books for preteens so consistently appealing (the books are officially
for ages 8-12, but are written so simply as to be fine for kids as young as six
or so). It is not just the books’ sensibility that hits the target again and
again – it is the formulaic nature of the plots, the intricate-but-not-too-intricate stories, the strong
similarities among the heroic protagonists, the completely clueless and
inevitably dull parents, the entirely one-dimensional characters (protagonists
included) who are defined by what they do rather than by any attempt to give
them an inner life of any sort. These are books that kids in the target age
range can read quickly and easily; they are styleless by intent, fast-paced by
design, surface-level by plan, and entertaining by definition.

Gutman (born 1955)
occasionally writes standalone books, but his style, his entire creative
formula, invites churn-them-out series, and he produces those prolifically. His
newest is Flashback Four, whose title
obviously recalls the Fantastic Four of Marvel Comics fame and whose plot uses
the time-worn time-travel trope in a manner reminiscent of the Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope
Osborne. The first Flashback Four
book, The Lincoln Project, of course
has to set the scene for the series, which it does in typically brisk Gutman
manner. There is a mysterious billionaire, a woman named Chris Zandergoth, who
is obsessed with photographs and happens to have at hand technology that makes
time travel possible. So she recruits four 12-year-old kids (why should this
make any sense?) to travel through time and get photos, including, in the first
book, one of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. Gutman is honest enough
with himself and his readers to point out that “it shouldn’t be that difficult”
to keep track of which of the four kids is which, and of course it isn’t: there
are two girls and two boys; one boy is African-American; one girl comes from an
upper-crust family and one does not but is “bookish” and “serious.” No need to
know much more about them, and in fact there isn’t much more to know about them except that they exist to try to
get as many young readers as possible involved in the story: there is someone
to identify with based on your gender, your skin color, your interest or lack
of it in school, your family’s wealth, and other superficial characteristics. In
truth, there is no photo in existence of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address,
so the four protagonists’ journey through time has to fail – Gutman tosses in
bits of history in many of his books, but keeps things real enough so they do
not seem like alternative-world stories in which (in this case) there would be a photo of Lincoln speaking at
Gettysburg. The point of The Lincoln
Project is how the kids
eventually fail, and what they learn about the Civil War and Lincoln himself
during their expedition. Gutman makes up some things: for example, he places
both Lincoln’s son Tad and assassin John Wilkes Booth at Gettysburg, although
neither was actually there. But historical reality matters little in this book,
as in others by Gutman. What counts is keeping the story fast-paced, the
protagonists in trouble or one step ahead of it until the end, and the plotting
arranged so that the group members develop a bond during their adventure that
will stand them in good stead for the next book. On those bases, The Lincoln Project works quite well.

Gutman has also produced
numerous books in the My Weird School
series and its successors. He is currently up to the fourth volume of My Weirdest School, which has typically
silly Jim Paillot illustrations and a typically exclamatory title: Mrs. Meyer Is on Fire! This entry has to
do with learning about fire safety, which involves being taught by a
representative of the local fire department who, the kids think, likes fire
just a little too much. So the kids decide to investigate, and they find out
something surprising about Mrs. Meyer, and that results in a for-real fire, but
nobody gets hurt, and everything is just fine at the end – and the
Gutman/Paillot team is on track for whatever series entry comes next. Similarly,
Gutman’s Baseball Card Adventures
series continues to produce reliable stories in its vein. The twelfth, originally published last year and now
available in paperback, features Joe Stoshack (“Stosh”) traveling back in time
to 1951 to investigate possible cheating in the National League pennant race.
Yes, this is another time-travel tale, its story made possible by Stosh’s
baseball cards (again, as with Flashback
Four, why should this make any sense?). The highlight of this adventure is
not Stosh’s investigation itself – it is no more likely to turn up previously
unknown information than the kids in The
Lincoln Project are to get their photo of Lincoln. What matters here, as
the book’s title indicates, is Stosh’s chance to meet Willie Mays, although it
is only when Stosh returns to the present that he fully understands who Mays
was. This series is, of course, for dyed-in-the-wool preteen baseball fans.

Flashback Four, My Weird School and its successors, and Baseball Card Adventures are open-ended
series that Gutman can keep going as long as he wishes (which means as long as
kids and their parents continue buying the books). But some Gutman series do
come to an end, such as The Genius Files.
This five-book sequence concluded last year with License to Thrill, which is now available in paperback. It is all
about twin protagonists (a boy named Coke and a girl named Pepsi, mercifully
shortened to Pep much of the time) being subjected to torment after torment and
mystery after mystery during an extended road trip. The family here is even
dimmer than usual in Gutman’s books. The parents of Coke and Pep spend most of
their time being beyond oblivious and all the way into brain-dead, although at
the very end they finally say, “We thought you were just putting us on. …You
know, the way teenagers do.” And this leads the twins to recite, for readers
who may have forgotten, all the things they endured on the cross-country trek,
during which they were “almost frozen to death, boiled in oil, pushed into a
sand pit…thrown into a vat of Spam, kidnapped, blasted with loud music…swarmed
by bats, abducted by aliens, sprayed with poison gas, [and] had stuff dropped
on our heads.” You get the idea. So do the twins’ parents, very belatedly
indeed. It is the over-the-top humor that is most attractive in this series,
including its final book. Gutman uses suitably juvenile humor frequently in his
work, but here there is more of it than is his custom, often couched in
comments to the reader: “At this point, you’re probably starting to feel a
little angry that Coke hasn’t been thrown into a volcano yet. I mean, I promised
back in chapter 1 that Coke was going to get thrown into a volcano. And here we
are in chapter 11, and the twins are nowhere near a volcano.” But Gutman does deliver what he promises, although
not quite in the way readers likely expect, and he shows here that he is as
capable of wrapping up a series as he is of extending one ad infinitum.

He is also capable, as
noted, of producing occasional standalone books, such as Johnny Hangtime, originally published back in 2000. Kids or parents
unsure about whether Gutman’s work is for them or their families may want to
pick up the new paperback of this short book, which churns out most of the
trademark Gutman elements in a quick-setting package. Johnny Thyme (real name
of the title character) is a stunt double for a stereotypically stuck-up,
self-important Hollywood star; Johnny’s contract forbids him ever to reveal
what he does and requires him to play it so safe that he cannot even stand up
to a bully because he might get hurt and thus affect film production. Johnny is
in the business as a kind of tribute to his father, a great stuntman who died –
supposedly – in a super-dangerous “gag” (as stunts are called here, in a nod to
real movie language) at Niagara Falls. Johnny is a little older than a typical
Gutman protagonist – he is 13 – but he is otherwise just as superficial as
other Gutman central characters. The attraction of this book lies in the
outrageous, unbelievable stunts that Johnny has to do, for money but no credit
– somehow in this Hollywood, there is
no rumor-mongering and there are no leaks to the media about who really does
the movies’ stunts, meaning Johnny is totally anonymous and everybody thinks
the films’ star does the stunts himself. Yeah, right. But, as in other Gutman
books, believability is not a strong suit and does not need to be. Toward the
book’s end, Johnny’s allegedly dead father suddenly turns up alive, with a
preposterous story about what happened to him and a determination to prevent
Johnny from doing the stunt that almost
killed him (the dad, that is). Gutman then suddenly produces a twist that gets
both father and son off the hook – and it gets the film’s director off his hook, too, thus making possible the
proverbial happy ending. What is really interesting about Johnny Hangtime is how close a couple of scenes come to revealing,
perhaps unintentionally, what Gutman’s own writing is all about. In one
discussion about a planned movie, the director says to Johnny’s mom, “‘The
whole movie is superfluous!
…Moviegoers don’t care about the relationship between two kids. They want to
see somebody fall out of a plane and land on a horse. They want to see the
plane explode in a huge fireball.’” Substitute “preteen readers” for
“moviegoers” and see where that takes you. Or just go a few pages forward and
accept, verbatim, what the director says directly to the stuntkid: “‘The story
makes no sense at all, Johnny, but it’s great!’” OK – got it. Very clearly.